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Topic: SR Fiction - Legends (Read 7318 times)

A few months into 1987 (surprisingly I can’t remember the exact month), I biked over to Desert Hobbies in Tempe AZ (long since defunct) to see if there were any new release for BattleTech. I had the 2nd Edition Box Set, CityTech, Technical Readout: 3025, Fox’s Teeth and Tales of the Black Widow Company. What would the next thing be? I was excited! Much to my shock that next thing I found was a novel: Decision At Thunder Rift.What, a novel? For a universe I was already rapidly falling in love with? No…way…dude (said in a drawling, 15-year-old’s 80′s-style voice). I devoured the thing almost in one sitting…and well…I’ve pretty much devoured every novel since.

For Shadowrun, it was a significantly different experience, but no less impactful for its lasting measure of my enjoyment of the universe. The big exposure to those novels came when I started working at FASA Corporation in 1996. I wanted to be as helpful as I could to Mike Mulvihill (the then SR Line Developer), and so I borrowed 20 some SR novels from the FASA library and read one-a-night until I polished them off inside a month (didn’t have kids yet, so I could do that sort of stupidly-awesome marathon sprint).

Personally, professionally, in every way you can name, the BattleTech and Shadowrun novels have been woven indelibly into my life. And I’ve talked and read and discussed at endless game nights and cons with so many of you…the same applies to tens of thousands of people all over the globe.

For those that have been following us for a good long time, you might remember that three years ago we were in the process of releasing into epub the entire back catalog of BattleTech and Shadowrun novels when we had to pull them down at the request of our licensor. Three long, long years of work and negotiations and we just posted an announcement surrounding the return of these fantastic stories, rebranded as Legends. (Monster kudos to Loren Coleman for never giving up and for dealing with piles of legalities that makes my skin crawl; Blaine Pardoe for the crack in the armor; Matt Heerdt for Herculean cracking of old files and endless epub generation; Aaron Cahall for crazy reviewing and reformatting of some of the truly ancient files; David Kerber for a pile of cover graphic layouts.)

In additional to Alex Iglesias brilliant re-imagined Double-Blind cover above, we’ve got Victor Moreno slaying it with his re-imagined Shadowrun Secrets of Power Trilogy, as well as some additional new art and some great art pulled from the archives for our initial launch titles.

So whether you’re brand new, coming back after a hiatus, or just looking for epubs to read on your e-reader of choice of books still on your shelf, it’s a brilliant time to leap in and grab these wonderfully, seminal action adventures!

I purchased the first Legends book on Amazon, but the latter two Legends books have yet to show up. I'll check again next week.

If you get them off DriveThru you get an epub and mobi version. You can email your kindle the mobi version, or if you have an iDevice you can upload the epub version to your phone/tablet to read there. After I learned this I stopped seeing a reason to buy SR books off of the kindle store.

I started to read Never Deal with a Dragon and it's good. Like REALLY good.

I don't mean to knock the new writers, because I do enjoy the new novels. But my biggest complaint about the new novels is that they seem to be too high level. Like there is a lot of world building going in to Never Deal with a Dragon, and there is world building in stuff like Borrowed Time, but it doesn't feel as fleshed out. Like when Winterhawk has to deal with those ghouls, I thought that was kind of a nice touch instead of just murdering them outright. But my problem is, like why are the ghouls there? How did they get there? In Never Deal with a Dragon, they'll go and give a quick reason why to help explain the world. Like I already know what a BTL is, but having a quick paragraph to explain it to the reader as well as the social ramifications of it, that's world building.

When I read the new novels, it sometimes feels like things are happening to the characters because something needs to happen to them. Like Elijah needs to go to Amazonia for...something, I can't remember what off of the top of my head, and so suddenly, they're hunted down by every gang in the city with a large firefight. There were little things, like seeing the firefight from the ganger's perspective that made it enjoyable. But I don't recall the context for why the fighting started in the first place or how the ganger's knew other than through deus ex machina. The worst part was when they drove through the rainforest and were being harassed by the local indian tribes for seemingly no reason.

I'm just ranting, I'm confident I couldn't do better myself...as I've tried to start writing several times and always lose steam and focus. But I like the novels because they give context to the Sixth World and the SR rule set. I think that's why I really enjoy the short fiction in the sourcebooks more. Because it really helps sell it.